Written by

Tom Loftus
| The Courier-Journal

State lawmakers expressed dismay and - in one case - outrage Wednesday over a $3.1 million fuel-testing lab that costs $900,000 a year to operate and isn't saving money as former Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer had said it would.

Farmer had said the state-of-the-art lab equipment would be a good value over the previous practice of sending fuel samples to a private lab, according to his successor as commissioner, James Comer.

But Comer told the General Assembly's interim joint Agriculture Committee on Wednesday that, when he became commissioner, he found the cost of testing for bad ...